|
II. Relationship between Human Rights and Environmental Protection
Generally speaking, the relationship between human rights and environmental protection can be considered as coherent, contrary, and interdependent. Firstly, it is coherent somewhat. There is an increasing tendency for environmentalists and human rights activists to work together toward common goals. Some international organizations such as Greenpeace and Amnesty International, are natural affinity, because “both aim to reduce the reserved domain of domestic jurisdiction protected under Article 2(7) of United Nations Charter’ . Similarly, some domestic groups are working together to restrain the exercise of unaccountable power by governments and private actors. Secondly, tensions exist. The basic discordant is that human rights are anthropocentric rights. Environmentalists may distrust the priority which activists are likely to accord to the human being over other species and ecological process. While, the human rights activists may criticize environmental movement disregarding immediate human needs in the quest to protect biota, finite natural resource, and the basic needs of future generations. Thirdly, the human rights and environmental protection are “interdependent, complementary, and indivisible”. As Michael Anderson stated, the interdependence argument obviously works in many circumstances, it sometimes serves as “a moral comforter which temporarily cloaks the extremely difficult questions which must be faced.”
Lots of environmentalists and scholars have noticed, the precise relationship between human rights and environmental protection is far from clear. In Anderson’s article, he mentioned the relationship may be conceived in two main ways. First, “environmental protection may be cast as a means to the end of fulfilling human rights standards” . The reason is that “degraded physical environments contribute directly to infringements of the human rights to life, health, and livelihood, acts leading to environmental degradation may constitute an immediate violation of internationally recognized human rights”. And an effective environmental protection system would help “ensure the well-being of future generations as well as the survival of those persons, often including indigenous or economically marginalized groups, who depend immediately upon natural resources for their livelihoods” .
A second approach reserves the one just described in that “the legal protection of human rights is an effective means to achieving the ends of conservation and environmental protection”. Since, if the human rights are fully realized, it will help build a more upstanding society and a political order, therefore claims for environmental protection are to be respected more easily. Hereby, a more ambitious view on this issue is given birth, which is that there should be an environmental right, which is an inalienable, “actual and independent human right to a satisfactory environment as legally enforceable right”. Arguably, as Anderson and DeMerieux both assert, it is no longer the impact of the environment on other human rights which the law’s focus on but the environment itself.
|
